In the 1987 frightening favorite The Lost Boys, Kiefer Sutherland played a charismatic beach-dwelling vampire who lures Jason Patric’s unwitting new teen in town into the brood. The friendship is ill-fated, of course, once Patric’s Good Guy Michael realizes Sutherland’s Bad Boy David is, you know, a blood-lusting monster.

But the relationship between Sutherland and Patric behind the scenes was not nearly as fraught.

“Jason Patric and I became really close on that film,” Sutherland told Yahoo Entertainment during a 2016 Role Recall interview (watch clip above). “Because we were really going through very similar things. Our careers were starting to get exciting.”

Sutherland was coming off an acclaimed performance for playing another antagonist, the rural hoodlum Ace Merrill in 1986’s Stand by Me, while Patric was fresh off his debut role that same year in the lesser-seen sci-fi actioner Solarbabies, which co-starred the third member of their Lost Boys love triangle, Jamie Gertz.

“Jason was a very serious actor,” Sutherland said. “I was a very serious actor too, I maybe was not as serious as Jason. I just don’t think I’m as serious as Jason, period. But we were 19, 20, we were in Hollywood working. It was a really exciting time.”